H-Class Invenio
Digital Asset Management
Digital Asset Management is the ability to associate descriptive metadata about a particular program or advertisement, to the video and audio essence of that program or advertisement. Metaphorically speaking, a digital asset management application establishes the genetic heredity of a digitized event — its DNA.
This matters because more and more ways to receive and play digital media are coming available. People get their content over wireless and broadband links now, in addition to traditional broadcast, cable and satellite distribution. They play that content on portable media players and cellular telephones, in addition to TVs and computer screens.
If you’re the one who created the content, owns it or has any role in moving it from one place to another — in its entirety or edited segments of it — you need a consistent way to know that content. That’s where digital asset management systems flourish. It goes beyond rich traffic applications, which do extract metadata about a show in order to populate a playout schedule — but they don’t associate that metadata back to the original asset.
A second important attribute of a digital asset management application is that it applies metadata within the piece of content, not just around it. As far as granularity goes, the Harris approach to digital asset management means you can apply metadata literally to the frame level. Now, obviously, at 24 frames-per-second on a 30-minute show, it’s probably overkill to mark each and every frame with associative metadata. However, the ability to identify the innards of a show by key segments — the lists of goals, the shocking moments — future searches and edits are significantly enhanced.
